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OpenAI to acquire Pierre Computer Company

https://openai.com/index/openai-to-acquire-pierre/
246itunpredictable | | 75 | HN
tiffanyh | parent | next
I have to imagine this is related to: https://openai.com/index/scaling-git-at-openai/

And you'll see that mitchellh is a big fan of Pierre (and I think investor)

https://x.com/mitchellh/status/2036855931569651884?lang=en

For those who don't know Pierce, here's a demo from mitchellh:

https://x.com/mitchellh/status/2057229385963618787

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lalitmaganti | parent | next
He is a minor investor. He commented on the acquisition at https://x.com/mitchellh/status/2118012675582280038
mi_lk | parent | next
tangent: I think mitchellh was talking about moving Ghostty off GitHub? Any update?
MangoCoffee | parent
i found Mitchell's answer to someone's question regarding why buy a open source software company, very interesting.

https://x.com/mitchellh/status/2118017893921436019?a=bCZdMwC...

code/coding isn't valuable. the problem solving skill is what set a good and bad engineer apart.

throwaway2037 | root | parent
For those too lazy to open the Twitter/X link:

    > @0xTMK: Why do companies acquire open source software companies if everyone can already access the repos?
    > @mitchellh: Because code by itself isn't valuable. Coding is the easy part.
So... acqui-hire? No hate on that, but this team must be wildly talented.
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paxy | parent | next
We need a term for an acquisition where you buy an entire company because it would be cheaper than paying a monthly subscription fee to use their product.
rebeccapowell | parent | next
Acquiscription, n. - The acquisition of an entire company after reviewing its enterprise pricing.
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danjc | parent | next
Subscription avoidant acquisition strategy
andriy_koval | parent | next
why would owner sale company at loss?..
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{"deleted":true,"id":50371913,"parent":50371843,"time":1793828261,"type":"comment"}
newsclues | parent
SubSkip acquisition
frangonf | parent | next
I read good things about their diffs library: https://diffs.com/

Whenever I see this acquires or hiring of successful products founders or teams by big labs I ask myself if, apart for the usual obvious reasons that any non ai model company would want them, they are also reusing this human talent to build the dataset of "how the sausage is made".

qbane | parent | next
Also the file tree library: https://trees.software/

Sadly this level of attention to detail is going to extinct

pksunkara | parent | next
I am actually using it in the code forge I am building, https://juju.bi

In fact, Pierre's earlier iteration was a code forge and mine is heavily inspired by it.

sebmellen | parent
Wow, that page crashed my iPhone!
Ralfp | parent | next
Cool. Pierre Computer is a company founded by original Bootstrap devs: Jacob Thornton and Mark Otto
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ferryth | parent | next
>Git infrastructure at scale

>Code.Storage powers the largest agentic workloads in the industry to store code and other machine generated artifacts at scale using git.

>Lovable, Poke, Anything, Bolt, Amp, Parahelp, and many others rely on Code.Storage to store their generated code, memory files, design artifacts, legal documents, and other product files and resources that change over time.

paaloeye | parent
AI bros buying AI bros. All those companies in the list have ca. 10x inflated valuation.

I bet in 5 years nobody will remember 95% of them.

woah | root | parent
AI bros or not, presumably they have better uptime than Github
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AdamN | parent | next
I'm interested in knowing more about the company itself. How many people is/was it? Were they working all in an office together or local-remote, or fully globally distributed? Was the focus massive scale, or ultra-low latency (for agent iteration), or agent-first (but human in the loop) usecases that could be enabled by having core control of a git service and the wrappers around it?
Betelbuddy | parent
Well Claude is French and Pierre too so....
withzombies | root | parent
Claude is American both in the company and in the namesake. He was born in northern Michigan.
Betelbuddy | root | parent
https://www.etymonline.com/word/Claude

masc. proper name, from French form of Claudius.

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Legend2440 | parent | next
I wish these "acquired by" announcements started with an explanation of what the startup was in the first place.

I had never heard of them before and have no clue what they do or why OpenAI wanted to buy them.

Pedro_Ribeiro | parent | next
Why not just visit the company's website? It would take less effort than writing this comment. Why is HN a hyperbolic bikeshedding chamber where everyone is trying to outnitpick each other?
n2d4 | root | parent | next
Unfortunately, their website is also not very helpful.

You'll have to click the link through to https://code.storage to understand: They host Git servers at scale, especially for agentic companies like Lovable (who create many projects and need many code repos to store them).

heyoni | root | parent | next
Why context when discuss???
frmrtntn | root | parent
Site currently seems to be broken, as it eventually just returns a "Dang" error message with a picture of a tombstone. How quirky and cute! Just like the insufferable po-mo marketing on the twitter account.
ImJasonH | parent | next
Isn't that literally what's in the first paragraph of the announcement?

https://openai.com/index/openai-to-acquire-pierre/

robotresearcher | root | parent | next
It is, but the HN post does not link to that.
10111001 | root | parent
> Craftsmanship meets scale for the agentic era

Words have meaning. I really hate PR that just has no respect for language. To me that reads like "Toxic waste, lovingly dumped into the river with a dump truck."

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Maxatar | parent | next
One of the primary reasons HTML supports links is to avoid always having to repeat information that's already available elsewhere.

The first sentence of this submission includes a link to the company's homepage, which states what the company does and what its products are. There's no need for every announcement to be entirely self-contained when the relevant information is just a click away.

passive | parent | next
As someone with a cat who used to be named "Vito", but eventually ended up as "Pierre", I'm going to assume "Pierre Computer" somehow makes your AI act more French. :P
RobotToaster | root | parent
The AIs are now on strike.
casey2 | parent | next
OpenAI lacks process knowledge and technical experience, so they acquire it. They are so lacking that acquiring almost any established tech company needs no justification.
itunpredictable | parent
or how much they got bought for...
lxe | parent | next
https://github.com/kohoj/codex-app-teardown they were using Pierre libs for a while, so only natural.
woggy | parent | next
I like the name "Pierre Computer Company".
lifeisloving | parent | next
Remember when OpenAI bought a device company for 6 billion dollars, a company that had never made a device.

Remember when OpenAI bought a podcast that gets 500 views and no comments on Youtube for 100 million dollars?

(And they've never advertised on it either, their name isnt anywhere on the screen while theirs dozens of other sponsors)

Im convinced Sam is just passing money to his friends, bribing or something idk. Something seems off.

uhryks | parent
When your company is bleeding billions every year already, buying startups is pocket money. If anything it's actually a good diversification strategy to build tools that bring new value not directly tied to their loss leader product.
lifeisloving | root | parent
Huh?

No.

Neither of these companies made money, the podcast nobody watches literally made more money than the 6 billion dollar device company.

You dont buy companies that make negative amounts of money and are newer than you. No idea where you got that idea.

Onavo | parent | next
TIL the founders of the company are not all named Pierre :(
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rsanheim | parent | next
nooooo.

I mean good for the team, I'm sure they will make out quite nicely.

But it was really great to see high quality OSS being extracted from their enterprise-focused https://code.storage/ service. Not I imagine the oss updates and new libs will decline, maybe not right away, but eventually, especially as they get rolled into whatever the product-offering of the week is that altman cooks up.

Oh well. so it goes

casey2 | parent | next
OpenAI continues to do everything right, using their position to acquire as many companies as possible. If you don't take a peak at the horror show that is Anthropic everything would look good.
hmokiguess | parent | next
what else is left out there to build and get bought
dist-epoch | parent | next
Refreshing, compared to "our journey" and "our mission" slops
katzenq | parent
The plural of slop is slop.
dfhqll | parent | next
Musk envy. Cursor was also building large scale git infrastructure. Pierre Computing does the same.

All these companies need success stories but only end up making dev tools, a notoriously unprofitable market. The corporate market is already saturated with LLMs/agents because of the dictatorial forced rollout, so there is actually no growth in sight at all.

rodonn | parent | next
It's not Musk-envy, it's just everyone is running into similar scaling issues at the same time. Agentic coding is breaking Github, so everyone is moving towards new ways of working with git. Anthropic built their own system https://www.anthropic.com/research/redesigning-source-contro... and so did OpenAI https://openai.com/index/scaling-git-at-openai/
brown9-2 | parent
you think OpenAI needs success stories and is therefore pivoting to dev tools?
Zigurd | root | parent | next
I'm thinking herd mentality because software development is where people actually pay for AI. Not that the Cursor acquisition will ever pay for itself.
qrwte | root | parent
Yes ELIZA, OpenAI needs success stories. As does Anthropic. This zero growth LLM coding scam will collapse at some point.
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varispeed | parent
Funny how small business is resembling product at a slave market, where they are trying to show nice teeth and muscles, hoping that AI master or another whale will buy them.

At least it is a signal AI is not good enough yet, so that they could clone it in one prompt.